in his chair, he went to another monitor. This archived all the reports, visual and verbal, that had been collected by the base’s intel-gathering equipment since the time of the Long Night. There was, in truth, very little. This system had been designed for use in the days before the darkness, and it had a vast capacity for memory. It was a sign of how things had degenerated that only a fraction of its vast storage capacity was in use. This made it simple for the search facility to scan intel for correlation with the people on the screen.
The search bought several matches, recorded over a period of time. There was precious little to go on, as there were very few facilities capable of broadcast and communication technology in these days. But these sparse mentions added up to a picture, one that Thunder Rider had noted while he had scanned the outside, preparing for his entrance.
This group of people—who seemed to have added and lost a few members over time, but remained with the same core nucleus—had, like himself, been pillars of right. They were the kind of allies he sought.
More…The vision of the red hair floating in a nonexistent breeze stirred something within him. It was something new, something that he had never felt before.
He was determined. When he had completed maintenance and refueling, when he had rested himself, then he had to find them.
He had to find her.
THEIR FIRST INDICATION that all was not well came with the burst of fire that seemed to erupt from nowhere, kicking up the sandy soil a few yards ahead of them. The horses reacted, moving erratically enough to throw off balance those who were in the back of the wag. It was as well that the horses had proved themselves calm to the point of stupidity under fire, otherwise Jak, currently at the reins, would have dropped them with a slug to each head. As it was, he was able to pull them around, giving those in the back the chance to find their feet and grab their weapons.
The burst of fire was followed by silence, the echo on the still air, mocking them. With the wag sideways-on to the direction the burst had come from, they lined up behind the shelter of the vehicle, just as they had when the mystery rider had skirted them. There was no other cover in this barren landscape.
“What do you reckon?” Ryan asked J.B.
The Armorer scanned the land between the wag and the horizon. Only the first few buildings on the edge of Station Browns ville broke the unrelenting flat.
“It didn’t sound like serious ordnance, or rip up much dirt. It had to have come from someplace between here and the buildings, some kind of hide or shelter. No way something that weak got that distance otherwise.”
Jak had been scanning the ground ahead of them, blotting out the conversation beside him. If there was anywhere they could hide, then he was determined to spot it. With no cover, it had to be some kind of dugout. Even the best-made hide would show somewhere against such a featureless surface.
It wasn’t well made, and it didn’t take him long to locate it.
“Ryan, there. Forty degrees,” he whispered, directing the one-eyed man’s gaze along a line prescribed by his bony white finger. Ryan followed and saw it immediately. Once you knew where it was, it was obvious: raised by the side of a cactus, dust-and dirt-covered canvas over a hole with a built-up ledge. Just enough of a slit between dirt and canvas to see out of, to direct a blaster.
Ryan beckoned Mildred and indicated the hide. “Just frighten the fucker out,” he said simply.
Mildred nodded and focused her aim. Her Czech-made ZKR was a specialist target pistol, and she had once been a specialist target shooter. This was simple. She placed three shots around the lip of the hide. One kicked up dust in the center, while the others knocked out the tiny supports that gave the hide its view of the world. With a puff of dust, the hide closed up.
“So we know where you are, you know where we are. We could have taken you out, but we didn’t want to. You come out, we won’t shoot. We aren’t your enemy…but we might know who is. We’re chasing a coldheart with a freaky motorcycle—”
“That fucker. Okay, I’ll trust you ’cause I’m pinned. Don’t let me down.”
The woman was an unlikely sec sniper. Dressed in a dirty camisole top, shorts and combat boots, long blond hair tied back, the large-busted and curvy young woman looked more like a gaudy slut who’d been given a blaster and thrown into the wrong job.
Showing good faith by holstering his SIG-Sauer and walking out into the open, Ryan prompted her to introduce herself.
“Name’s Anita. Long time since I hefted a blaster. More used to handling other kinds of weapons,” she said with a grin, “but I figure that we need all the skills we can get after what happened.”
“Which was?”
“Bastard you described…” Briefly, and with more cursing than even Jak would have thought possible, she outlined a situation similar to the one that went down in the last ville. By the time she had finished, the others had joined Ryan in front of the wag.
“So where the fuck do you fit into it?” Anita asked in what they had discovered to be her usual forthright manner.
Ryan told her briefly about their experiences, and about the pact they had made in the last ville.
“Should be glad we aren’t the only ones,” she said at the conclusion, “but then I wouldn’t wish that asshole on anyone. So I guess you’d better come on back with me, see if mebbe you can find out something else that would help.”
“You think there could be something?”
She shrugged. “Dunno. Can’t hurt to ask. ’Sides which, we’re pretty much on top of clearing up now. Weird fucker thought us girls were all prisoners. Didn’t touch any of us, just chilled all the men and blew up a lot of shit.”
“Where did a gaudy slut learn to shoot like that?” Krysty asked her.
The smile vanished. “My daddy.”
“He was a good shot?” Krysty prompted.
Anita sniffed. “Fucker wanted me to be mommy to my new little sister. Would have been if he’d got his hands on me. Sweetest shot I ever made, right through the bastard’s dick. Now, you gonna give me a ride back, or do I have to walk in front of that wag of yours?”
Doc gathered the horses and drove the wag into the ville, Anita sitting beside him to indicate that all was well. They made the short journey in silence, the friends gleaning what they could from the view out the back of the canvas wag cover.
There was little to see that wasn’t familiar to them. Station Browns ville was almost too small to have a center as such; rather, it had a few buildings that radiated from the hub, which was a cluster of about five buildings. It was difficult to tell, as they hadn’t been well-constructed, and the rider’s ordnance had wreaked more havoc here than the ville they had recently left.
The ville had looked fine from a distance: no smoking wreckage, and now they could see why. Any fires had long ago burned themselves out. The flattened center section of the ville was nothing more than rubble and corpses. Some of the gaudy sluts, incongruously still dressed for trade, were working to clear the corpses.
“How many of you are left, my dear?” Doc whispered.
“No
